


The Clouds Took Shape

by phantomreviewer



Series: Gorgon!Grantaire [4]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Depression, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-27 04:10:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12073257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantomreviewer/pseuds/phantomreviewer
Summary: "The clouds took the shape of Gorgon masks in the immensity of the heavens; every possible form of terror appeared." Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea.Grantaire lives under a dark cloud, his snakes writhe and twist and hiss, and under their scaled bellies blisters start to swell. He is rotten.





	The Clouds Took Shape

**Author's Note:**

> I was very surprised to find myself writing another piece in the Gorgon!Grantaire verse, it's had a tonal shift which cna probably be attributed to the fact that I myself am feeling rather under a cloud myself at the moment. But I'm pleased to be back writing. This hasn't been beta'd beyond me reading it over 24 hours after finishing the final draft. Please enjoy.

“Grantaire, I’m sorry but Joly was right,” Combeferre said, snapping off his rubber gloves with a flourish which was mostly likely unintentional, a by-product of teaching undergraduates and trying to draw attention to his conclusions rather than their dissections, “it’s snake rot.”

Grantaire let go of the snakeheads that he had been attempting to reign in against his pinpricked palm while Combeferre had pressed trembling fingers against soft underbellies, creeping up to that strange join where skin became scale, and flesh became fauna. They nipped at his fingers, better his than Combeferre.

And Grantaire had known this, had known that the irritation and rough rub against his scalp hadn’t been skin shedding. Had known that his snakes were becoming irritable, biting him with more regularity. He wasn’t sure if Enjolras had realised that his snakes weren’t writhing towards him as often as they had been. Instead they hissed and they curled and their blisters broke over the nape of Grantaire’s neck.

Grantaire can feel their pain, it is his pain after all, and the pain itches through his nervous-system like a phantom limb. It’s unusual for him to feel anything from his mambas, what is normally muted instead bursts into flaring reality.

The rot is visible to others now, Combeferre was only confirming a known fact. And Grantaire can’t help but feel it to be appropriate, rotten outside and in. Enjolras does not laugh when he announces this of an evening deep in his wine. Alcohol is medicinal after all, and anyway, the world looks more entertaining through yellow lenses. Grantaire doesn’t have to worry about the small things such as facts, illness or the disappointment in Enjolras’ eyes as he orders another bottle.

“How are you feeling Grantaire?” Asks Cosette, who is all but trembling in his presence. Grantaire is almost pleased that the snakes are acting lethargically at the moment, because this is the closest that poor Cosette has ever sat next to him, even though she’s eyeing up their slow and dopey movements as opposed to looking Grantaire in the face.

And that avoidance, alongside Grantaire’s own inner streak of cruelty is probably why he replies with one word:

“Rotten.”

She doesn’t smile, but she does slap him in the arm before diving into her bag to get out a very dubious looking bottle and proffering it towards him. Grantaire, never one to turn down suspicious looking liquids, takes it.

It’s a tonic, from her father. Grantaire tries to school his face into the appropriate reaction. He’s touched, he genuinely is, and says so - and heaven knows he isn’t doing anything proactive about his own disease – but he doubts that he’s going to use it.

(The decision is taken out of hands when Joly notices the bottle on the living room table and promptly goes white and seizes it as though Grantaire was about to chase after him, and pours it down the sink muttering about homeopathy and dangers of untested treatments. Who’d have thought that Cosette’s father was into new age medicine.)

She accepts his thanks, and he can see her almost considering pressing a kiss to his check before squeezing his hand and walking away, her skirt spinning atop her thighs. She’s too good for all of them, especially Marius.

Later he lies and tells her that the tonic honestly feels like it’s helping his snakes. They are looking worse, even with Joly invading his apartment and bathing his snakes and scalp in betadine once every other night and conditioning them with antibiotic ointment. It’s the strangest spa day Grantaire has ever had, and it almost doesn’t seem worth it.

The snakes hate it. Grantaire has blood and scars on his face, a chunk of his right ear has been ripped right off from them lashing out during treatment. He looks pox marked.

They won’t be milked. After a week and a half they lash out too much at Joly for him to continue bathing them. It’s difficult for Grantaire to cleanse them himself, but he can’t allow Joly to risk himself. Grantaire is already enough of a risk, he’s already gambled and lost himself. It doesn’t matter.

Joly has more important things to do, he hasn’t said as much. But Grantaire isn’t blind. Yet.

“Scale rot is one thing Grantaire,” Combeferre had berated him over the phone. Clearly the designated adult when Grantaire hadn’t shown up to the meeting which he had promised to attend, and played truant from with the lazy excuse that he was washing his hair. He wonders if anyone laughed when Bossuet read out the text. He hopes someone had. He’d been proud of that one in a horrible way. Enjolras wouldn’t have laughed. He doubted he’d even smiled. He misses Enjolras, he’s monster enough to admit that, but man enough to know that he’s rotten.

“But Grantaire, take your time to recover. But if they don’t start to improve soon it might be worth considering something more direct. If you skin picks up the infection of your scales it could be devastating, and you know this. Your neurology is gorgonic, and I’m especially concerned about ocular infection, it’s been known to happen. Scale rot developing into something else. If you can make it to next week’s meeting, I’ve been speaking to out of the researchers in the lab and-”

Combeferre should have expected Grantaire to hang up the phone at that point, and Grantaire would hate to be a disappointment. After all, he’s so good at it.

Most of his snakes are improving, he feels loath to admit it because if improvements are happening then Grantaire should be better, not worse. There are no new blisters, and for the vast majority of his head their bellies are soft and newly scaled. Except two. By his left ear, hanging sad; limply. Eyes sluggish, hisses drying out as though their black tongues are too heavy for their mouths, and scales cracking and blistering as the only signs of life. They look at him, eyes lethargic and morose from the bathroom mirror. They don’t even have the energy to turn into him. Grantaire has a headache where they hang, as though the rot has got deep into his brain.

Grantaire’s brain has always been rotten. He lives under a black cloud. It’s just got a little darker than usual. That was the problem, Grantaire reasoned, with spending so much time in the light, with the light. That it only made the darkness brighter.

When Grantaire was younger, much younger, a rebellious teenager bitter at the world that had cursed him for a crime he hadn’t committed and still full of righteous anger and self-loathing in powerful mix, he had taken up the kitchen scissors.

His mother had cried when she’d caught him, caught him before he’d even done anything. Before he sheared himself. He’d have bled out, he knows that now. If he’d cut his snakes off at the root. It had to be cauterized. He hadn’t cared. He’d wanted to rip the snakes out, the idea of gripping and twisting out the root of the infection.

His mother had cried, and he had cried and he hadn’t done it.

He should have done it. It would have been better. Better than this.

Most medical professionals focused their studies, and so Grantaire was technically listed under a nonhumanity specialist. Had he cared enough his specialist could have been contacted for his scale rot, but nothing mattered, and he didn’t have the finances anyway. It was quicker and easier to let Joly buy cheap remedies that had the Amis seal of approval, and that Combeferre didn’t tut over the ingredients. His friends left him quicker than a doctor would, after all Grantaire was scientifically interesting. What Grantaire was actually, was tired. So tired.

His doctor, when he had visited, had hovered around the black moods that Grantaire touched on. Depression was so very human, and she was a nonhumanity specialist. It hadn’t been her field, and she would have to get him a referral. He had laughed it off. In a twisted way it almost made Grantaire feel more man than beast, to dwell in those depths. Such a human trait, sorrow upon sorrows.

Snakes don’t regrow. They’re not friends and they’re not pets. They’re limbs, extensions of being. Like teeth and fingernails, the refuse of a lived body. Except with poison and scales and death inside. An outward manifestation of what he felt within, except they hiss and bite and lash out at the world.

But two hang limply, dead coils and their weight, physical and emotional is almost too much. He can’t do it.

Grantaire hasn’t left his house in days.

He hasn’t seen Enjolras in almost a week, it feels infantile to wonder if his boyfriend missed him. He had, of course he had. Grantaire knew that as an objective fact because Enjolras doesn’t lie even through unreplied text message. But that doesn’t stop the thoughts. Or the silence.

The other snakes can smell death, and the cloying aftertaste is in the back of Grantaire’s own throat. He opens another beer. The taste makes him wretch, and the snakes hiss angrily, but the aura of decay is washed out of his mouth momentarily.

He is drunk when there is a knock on the door. He has been drunk for many hours. His remaining head of scales hisses, they sway in the imagined breeze, feeling the effects in blood-alcohol.

It is Enjolras, of course, armed with a canvas bag; Joly’s gardening gloves, bandages, a lighter, rubbing alcohol and a scalpel.

He might speak, but Grantaire does not know. If he does, then Grantaire doesn’t register it. He already knows, knows what Enjolras is there to do for him.

It is all too much.

Grantaire lies there, head in Enjolras’ lap, like a child, weeping as Enjolras carefully, hissing in sympathy, carefully cuts away the two mambas leaving an empty patch behind Grantaire’s ear.

The others bite at the rubber around Enjolras’ wrists, sensing blood and poison, confused as only beasts can be and not understanding that Enjolras is helping them. In the bastardised way that they could feel anything, Grantaire’s snakes provisionally liked Enjolras, but protection comes before affection. It always has for Grantaire at any rate.

It feels cold, even though Grantaire saw Enjolras burn the blade of the scalpel before cutting in. The pain was a strange sensation, alternating between the phantom touch of the scales, that false equivalence of touch and familiarity whenever they were touched by human hands, and the sharp cutting sensation of blade in skin and the gorgonic nervous system, closer to that of _homo sapien_ than _homo reptilia_. It hurts. And the surgical spirit, Grantaire has taken his solace in alcohol since before he could remember, and even that was turning on him, stinging and biting because his biology wouldn’t react to minor surgery and the open wound by snakeskin had to be sterilized before wrapping.

He clutches the inside of Enjolras knee, and stains his jeans with tears. He’s too scared to look Enjolras in the eye once he’s finished, eyes tightly bound as Enjolras with gentle hands bandages the spot that will be scarred for life. The snakes fight lethargically against the cloth, but the rubbing alcohol directly has muted them as well. They are dumber and slower than usual. If he could anthropomorphise them Grantaire would say that they mourned, but they were just dumb beasts. Like him. Still, he wept.

“Joly wants to come and check that I’ve done a good job later, but, we thought it best that I came.” He says all of this to Grantaire’s shoulder, for while he has risen from Enjolras’ lap he has not graduated to upright, instead he has dropped his head into the warmth provided by the crook of Enjolras’ neck and the man had the forethought to wear a turtleneck. The snakes curl amid themselves. There is possibly a kiss pressed to his temple, but Grantaire lives in a world of muted sensation, now that the scalpel has been removed and death has been cauterized.

The bandages itch. The inside of Grantaire’s mouth tastes like blood, death and stale tears.

He wants to ask for his glasses, to hide behind them. To have a shield of Athena before facing Enjolras. But Enjolras does so much already, he deserves to see Grantaire broken as he is. It is what, inexplicably, what Enjolras wants.

He looks straight at Enjolras, not allowing his eyes to flicker to the table with the scalpel, or the bag on the floor where he knows two of his snakes are. He supposes Enjolras was going to take them with him, Grantaire certainly doesn’t know what to do with them. He wouldn’t be offended if Combeferre dissected them, there could almost be something in that. He won’t suggest it, but nor will he object if the idea is raised. He supposes that it won’t be. His friends are kinder than he.

“Thank you,” he says and he doesn’t smile because he can’t. But Enjolras does, small and perfect, just a flash of white teeth before the serene look regains its rightful place.

Grantaire keeps his eyes up, knowing that his pupils are blown wider than usual, a stress response and if they weren’t yellow then perhaps they could be mistaken for human eyes. They flick from Enjolras’ eyes to his brow to his lips, as though the image has to be captured for all time. Like a statue. He doesn’t look away.

“There you are, it’s like I haven’t seen you for weeks.”

“It’s only been a few days.”

“I know, but you’re back now. And hopefully you can be you again.”

A small flurry of activity takes place, predicated with a kiss. Enjolras raises his hand, and Grantaire catches the palm with his lips, dry and tasting of blood. But amid the blood he can now taste Enjolras in the air, the snakes, still tired and limp, hiss quizzically. As though all life is coming back into Grantaire as he breathes Enjolras in.

Life begins quickly, with Enjolras gently berating Grantaire while pulling open the windows and fiddling with the thermostat forcefully.

“It’s too humid in here Grantaire, I understand there are places you go that I can’t follow, but, please, next time invite me.”

He hasn’t said I love you, and nor has Enjolras. There is sentiment in their actions and their words, but Grantaire thinks that perhaps the words have been historically redundant between them. He doesn’t feel that now. He is still too full of thoughts to vocalise them, it would be emotional and physical whiplash, and if Enjolras was to say those words to him now Grantaire can’t say that he would believe him. But Grantaire knows his feelings as a tangible fact, the knowledge of his own depth and width of his heart is worth the loss behind his ear. It is cold, and sore and itches. But he loves Enjolras.

Enjolras who has done all of this and more for him.

Enjolras cannot believe that he is rotten to the core, he would cut the infection away with his bare hands. And Grantaire cannot believe in himself, the cloud is too dark and the poison sunk into his bloodstream, his vision deadly and his very visage terrible in the most archaic sense of the word but he can believe in Enjolras. He has always been willing to do that.

**Author's Note:**

> To end on a quote from Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three.
> 
> _This figure was no longer Michelle Fléchard; it was Medusa. The wretched are terrible. The peasant woman was transformed into one of the Eumenides. This country woman, vulgar, ignorant, unreasoning, had suddenly assumed the epic proportions of despair. Great sorrows have a gigantic power of enlarging the soul; this mother represented maternity; everything which sums up humanity is superhuman; she rose then, on the edge of this ravine, before this conflagration, before this crime, like a power from the grave; her cry was like that of a wild beast, and her gestures like those of a goddess; her face, from which proceeded imprecations, seemed like a masque of flame. Nothing could be more sovereign than the lightning of her eyes bathed in tears; her eyes flashed lightning on the fire._


End file.
